


The Ceremony

by Maerissa



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Gen, Knighting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2019-11-05
Packaged: 2021-01-23 07:00:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21316078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maerissa/pseuds/Maerissa
Summary: For those she can still protect, Ingrid takes on the role she always strived for.(Post-Church route, inspired by https://twitter.com/natsuyiro_x/status/1191372495107969024)
Kudos: 22





	The Ceremony

Change was never something Ingrid had the luxury to be free from. Sometimes, change felt like the only constant in her life. Friends, classmates, relationships, means, reasons to keep living - times were few and far between when Ingrid didn’t have to react to and learn to live with circumstances suddenly changing on her. To survive, she clung as hard as she could to the one thing she never had to question - her ambition.

“Ingrid Brandl Galatea, please step forward.”

Her metal boots clacked on the stone steps as she took her position in front of her two green-haired - she dared to call them “friends” in her mind, in spite of what their working relationships had been and would now become. She looked up at their faces, equal parts solemn and proud, to burn them into her mind, then knelt down and closed her eyes.

“Do you swear to serve your cause faithfully and wholeheartedly, without reservation?”

Seteth’s familiar voice, perfectly suited for delivering archaic, ceremonial lines like this, put Ingrid’s heart slightly more at ease. She thought back to the long conversations she’d had with him in the chapel, agonizing about her future and the seemingly at-odds paths she and her family expected of her future. As Seteth had suggested, she had gone to her father to ask his blessing for the path she was choosing, and upon his rejection she knew what she had chosen was the only way forward. This place, not House Galatea, was her home now; the people in the chapel cheering her on today, not her relatives by blood, were her family.

“I do so swear.”

Saying those words out loud caused waves of contrasting emotions to flow through Ingrid, and she tensed her shoulders to try to stay steady. What had already felt so real and meaningful in the stories she’d shared with Ashe had a completely different, heavy impact when she was about to feel the real-world effects of that oath, and yet those effects still seemed so intangible and surreal to her. 

“Will you always serve and defend those you have sworn to protect, no matter the peril?”

This question, however, required no pause or further thought. Through the constant change and trauma in her life, the one thing that always kept her on this path when other reasons failed was her fierce commitment to protecting those she holds dear - 

“I do so swear.”

\- even if those she wanted to protect were already in their grave. Ingrid’s shoulders cramped tighter. She tried to bring up images in her mind of guarding Dimitri with her life as she’d promised him she would, but she knew full well that such memories had never existed. She would never even know how Dimitri fell at Gronder Field, just as she had failed to be there for Glenn. If only she had been there for the Tragedy - _ if only it had been her _ \- perhaps Dimitri wouldn’t have been haunted by the ghosts that must have eventually driven him to his ruin. If only she had been at Gronder Field - _ if only she could have taken the blow for him _ \- her king-to-be, the one she had promised to stand at the side of and then betrayed through her absence, would still be alive. Instead, those who mattered to her were already dead. Her reasons to reach for her goals had been let down, by no one but herself, and left only the empty promises of a “protector” who couldn’t do her single duty-

The ceremonial sword lightly touched her right shoulder, leaving a soft resounding _ clang _ from connecting with the metal shoulderplate. In an instant, Ingrid’s shoulders relaxed.

Despite her mind spiraling, she knew full well that she couldn’t keep living solely through guilt over her past - from what she had managed to piece together about Dimitri’s fall, she’d understood the torturous consequences living that way had had for him. She could never let Glenn or Dimitri go, but they weren’t the reasons for the step she was taking now.

Another _ clang _ sounded out as the sword touched her left shoulder. She opened her eyes and gazed up at the one holding the ceremonial sword, who looked back at her with an enigmatically almost-blank expression that Ingrid had learned to read as pride. The most official of her many new reasons to keep going down this path.

Ingrid let a slight smile draw onto her face, reflecting the already-clear smile in her eyes. For those that she was now swearing to protect, in the memory of those she would’ve protected, and for living the way she had always promised herself to live.

“Arise, Knight of Fódlan.”


End file.
